People need to realize you can use alternatives
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Based on my previous experience running a Mastodon server, 90%+ of people are going to concentrate on already popular servers, especially the "official" one. I suppose I will also close (or be strict about) registration at some point myself, but I have a feeling I am not going to have to worry about it for a long time. My goal now is just to get some friends and acquaintances to join any lemmy instance, bonus points if it is mine.
I've just started my journey into lemmy, but I have to say, the federation part definitely needs better tooling. Like exploring beyond the borders of my instance is (at least using Jerboa) relatively hard. It feels very much like distinct universes, and less like a single space (like Reddit).
Well, since I am one of the people who chose the "official" server on Lemmy as well as on Mastodon, I will tell you why I did it: The "official" server will most likely be the one, that has the least chance to be abandoned/closed at some time in contrast to a small server maintained by some student as a side-project (no offense :-) ). I don't want to loose everything and start at zero, so I chose the most "reliable" server.
Yeah the people that say "what instance you join doesn't really matter aside from your local page" when it does. It might be easier to get into an instance with only one other person, but that doesn't mean that instance will continue to exist a year from now or even tomorrow.
I absolutely understand. I used to run a Mastodon server, and stopped when it no longer interested me. I never really used twitter anyway whereas I am on reddit most every day, so I am expecting this to hold my interest/attention longer. I run a number of services for myself already (git, password manager, media hosting, authentication, etc) so the burden of one more thing in my homelab is minimal vs someone who isn't doing that sort of thing.
Overall, some manner of truly federated and distributed user identity is something the current fediverse seems to be lacking. Nobody has really adopted DID yet and most of its registries still rely on some sort of central authority for identity regardless.
There's a big difference between hosting single user servers vs public servers though. If it's just for you then you can do whatever you want with it and it can be a lot of fun (until something breaks that is)
Where is the content stored by the way? On the posting user's home server, on the destination community server, on both, or on every lemmy server? It wouldn't be so bad to lose a username on one server if it shuts down - just create a new one - but I want to be sure my contributions stay accessible indefinitely.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think the source of truth is the community's instance, that instance then informs the instances of anyone subscribed to that community. (This is all based on my understanding of how the pieces in ActivityPub could be fit together to build the features lemmy has)